Google’s News Search Gets Smarter

April 30th, 2007 Davis Posted in Technology, Media, Search |

Google Gets Smarter At Filtering Hosted on Zooomr

Ever since Google first introduced their news service, I have been hooked. There have been very few days where I have not visited their site. It is fantastic technology. Over the years, they’ve added new sources, introduced news alerts and have added personalization options, but the entire time it has remained ad free.

I’ve always read a lot of papers. I haven’t read all many most of the classic books, but even when I was in high school, I was a voracious reader of the press. I’m not sure why there was the appeal, but current events fascinated me and the internet has only added to that.

It used to be a lot harder to pay attention to specific things, but over time, tracking and personalizing news has only gotten easier and easier. Google News has been a big part of this. It’s multi-dimensional approach to the news, offers unique insights into current events and as far as searching mainstream news goes, it offers the best results.

I use Google news every several many times a day to track various companies and interests. Even though, I love the site, it does have one weakness, the minute the AP publishes anything, it becomes impossible to determine fresh content from syndication. During these news tornado onslaughts, I pretty much just give up on trying to use Google and go back to my other sources. Fortunately though, it appears that Google may have finally come up with a way to fix this problem.

When I logged into Google news tonight, I was treated with a nice treat. They have instituted filtering options that lets you list AP coverage as as one item, instead of 300 different publications. This is going to be very useful and I think it’s a great development. I’m also hoping that it will help to clean up some of the press release spam. I am not sure that other papers will like it, because I’m sure that they will lose some hits from the listings, but it does help to distinguish one voice from another in their news results and it should allow smaller publications a better chance to be heard over the din of the professional news media.